You're Wrong About Gangs

As anyone knows who has paid any attention to the illegal renditioning of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, the Trump administration's ostensible reason for this action is that the men are supposedly members of a dangerous gang. Whether they really are members of the gang or not has been mentioned somewhat in discussions I've seen, but there has been less attention paid to the general idea that "gang" is used as a scare word in this culture.

An August 2019 podcast by You're Wrong About looked at gangs as yet another instance of moral panic.

I have not been a listener of that podcast, being a late arriver to the Michael Hobbes phenomenon, so I just listened to it. I recommend this episode particularly. It fits squarely within other media that looks at the "war on crime" over-reaction, such as the Vera Institute's 2024 look-back at the 1994 Crime Bill.

In this You're Wrong About podcast, Hobbes identifies four attributes of moral panics generally, and discusses how they apply to the gang moral panic particularly. It's easy to see how moral panic applies to the present situation. The four attributes are:

• A real phenomenon (though not the one that's named). So in the case of gangs in the 1980s, the phenomenon was increased violent crime in cities.
• An exaggerated narrative, often with internal inconsistencies. For example, gangs of wilding teenagers — the equivalent of animals — were also devious, hierarchically organized drug lords. Thousands of them sprang up everywhere, almost overnight. 
• A disproportionate response. Gang task forces were created across the country, police militarized their equipment, and finally there was the 1994 crime bill. The task forces created lengthy lists of gang members and "known associates," including, at one point in Los Angeles, a list that encompassed half the Black men between the ages of 21 and 24.
• Failure to ever return to debunk it later. This left us with the continuing belief in gangs as a real thing, the idea of known associates, and therefore vulnerable to exploitation of those beliefs by the Trump administration currently.

Hobbes's cohost, Sarah Marshall proposed a fifth attribute that might apply:

• Identifying a problem in the dominant culture and projecting it onto an outsider group in order to eradicate it.

In our present situation, I would say the underlying real phenomenon is not crime (which has been trending downward for years, aside from the covid bump) or immigration, but many white people's unease with an increasingly diverse U.S. population. That has led to decreased support for the idea of immigration, which is relentlessly exploited by the right and pushed by right-wing media to the point where Great Replacement Theory has become almost mainstream.

In that context, labeling Latino men as gang members because they have tattoos, kidnapping them to another country, and dehumanizing them by shaving their heads and putting them on display is literally what Marshall said about projecting the problem onto a set of outsiders to try to eradicate it.